Every state in Nigeria should have its own ‘Amotekun’. That ought to be clear now to anyone desirous of ending the carnage by an assortment of violent gangs in the northern states. Before the creation of Amotekun, bandits and kidnappers were running riot in the Southwest, killing people at will and collecting ransom from the Read More…
Mohammed Inuwa Wushishi was the first Nigerian army general to make a lasting positive impression on me. Taciturn, sensitive and perhaps too considerate in interpersonal relations, Wushishi struck me as a man thrust into prominence by fate but who was more comfortable operating under the radar, away from klieg lights. I was part of a Read More…
As Obafemi Awolowo University (Great Ife) marks its 60th birthday, I cast a wistful look at those best years of our lives when greying men were boys and grandmas were delectable maidens. I look back with fondness. “To look backward for a while”, says Margaret Barber, “is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and Read More…
BOLA AHMED TINUBU is a redoubtable politician and one of the most dexterous political acrobats in the circus called Nigerian politics. Like him or loathe him, you deceive yourself if you say he is not consequential in determining who becomes Nigeria’s next president in 2023. Right now, Tinubu is one of the issues in Nigerian Read More…
WHEN BASHORUN JK RANDLE (scion of the illustrious Randle family of Lagos) handed over the property of his late aunt, Alhaja Munirat Muhammed, at 14A Bashorun Street, Ikoyi, to the Muslim community through the Lagos Central Mosque, many people who did not understand the symbiotic relationship between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria’s southwest, were confounded. Read More…
A thief is a thief whether he steals a golden crown or a cocoyam. The way we are now glamourising stealing and making celebrities of common felons, indicates that we are too far gone in our descent into amoralism. It wasn’t quite many decades ago when stealing was a shameful thing. There was something called Read More…
The vulture is a patient bird. That’s in the animal kingdom. Among humankind, the vulture of social media is the most restless and jumpy animal ever to walk the surface of the earth. In the forest, the bush or the desert, the vulture baits its prey until it drops dead. In real life among homo Read More…
Woe unto thee O land whose destiny is ruled by superstitions instead of production, thou shall continue to be vassals of the diligent, hewers of water and fetchers of firewood for the household of your former enslavers. Granted that the history of the black man has been tempestuous, but contemporary happenings indicate that the future Read More…
A LUTA CONTINUA! VITÓRIA É CERTA! (The struggle continues! Victory is certain!) That was our singsong in those heady student union days when our blood boiled with patriotic fervour as we challenged the excesses or inadequacies of our unelected military fiefs. That battle cry is so central to the raison d’être of student unionism that Read More…
REPEAT AFTER ME: I will not be anyone’s fool; not now, not tomorrow, not ever! The world inherited the word, Pandora, from the ancient Greek poet, Hesiod. In the poem, Works and Days, he told the story of Prometheus and Pandora. Prometheus had attempted to deceive the gods whose prefect was Zeus. In reprisal, Pandora Read More…